Elite Bastards review: Biostar TPower I55 motherboard
After taking a look at an Intel P55 chipset-based motherboard from ASUS last week to accompany the launch of a new range of "Lynnfield" CPUs and motherboards to go with them, today we examine another P55-sporting part, this time in the form of Biostar's TPower I55 offering.آ This particular motherboard offers up both NVIDIA SLI and AMD CrossFire support as part of its high-end, enthusiast oriented feature set, which of course also reflects on its price - can it prove to be worthy of consideration for this sub-set of potential buyers?
"The first thing that we notice from our first look at the TPower I55 is that it most certainly doesn't skimp on expansion slots - More on those later, as our eyes are also drawn to the impressively large heatsinks employed to cool the motherboard's P55 chipset itself as well as other major components.آ The general layout of the motherboard as a whole seems to be pretty good, although one of the fan headers gets blocked by basically any high-end graphics board you might care to use, while the floppy connector is also placed in a rather irritating position - Not that we really need a floppy drive connector on a modern system in 2009, so I'm not too sure why it's there at all."
Biostar TPower I55 motherboard review
As always, your thoughts and comments on this article are most welcome, and can be left in our forum.
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Welcome to the new Elite Bastards server!
Another week means another big change for Elite Bastards.... After our major back and front-end overhaul a couple of weeks ago we've been putting a lot of hours into optimising site performance, to the point where we simply couldn't squeeze anything more out of current infrastructure.آ That still wasn't good enough for us in terms of serving up our content to you quickly and reliably, so as a result we've gone away and completely replaced our hardware infrastructure with something far more powerful and scalable to our current traffic requirements.آ If you're reading this news post, then you're using that new server right now!
If you're curious as to the hardware we now employ (and of course you are, otherwise you wouldn't be here to read hardware reviews and commentary!), then our previous dual-core Xeon setup has been replaced by a quad-core Xeon clocked at 2.1GHz, the paltry 1GB of 800MHz memory previously available to our content server is now a much more comfortable 4GB running at 1066MHz, and our old system's Serial ATA hard drive is now a thing of the past, replaced by a 10,000 RPM SAS unit.
This new server is currently running all of our main content, and in the very near future we'll also be migrating our forum and IRC services to this new box as well, so thanks in advance for your patience while we make these changes.آ For now though, enjoy the new (and hopefully super-fast!) Elite Bastards, and thanks as always for your support.
I suppose this might also be a good time to mention by way of a reminder our ability to take donations via PayPal, all of which go towards running costs and the like?
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AMD launches Athlon II X4 620 and 630
The closer we get to the launch of Windows 7, the more you can feel the excitement of major hardware vendors and manufacturers ramping up as they see a chance to revitalise their sales alongside what they justifiably expect to be a major inflection point for the PC ecosystem as a whole.
AMD are certainly no stranger to this excitement, and today sees the launch of a couple of new CPUs that they hope will generate a lot of attention amongst people looking to buy or build cheap new systems to run Windows 7. Both of these parts make use of the Athlon II X4 brand name and are designed to be coupled as a platform with AMD's 785G motherboard chipset, but the real headline here is the launch of a quad-core CPU for just $99 (or around آ£80 here in the UK) - A first in the industry. There are plenty of reviews streaming in of these new parts, so if you want to check them out then here's the comprehensive list.
- Anandtech
- Firing Squad
- HEXUS
- Hot Hardware
- PC Games Hardware
- PC Perspective
- TechWare Labs
- Tweak Town
- X-Bit Labs
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